The present invention relates to a system for laying out shaped objects such as geometrical objects and the like in a specific space, and in particular, to a system for automatically creating a layout plan under various restrictive conditions.
In an ordinary case, a layout design is generated through the man-machine conventional processing for laying out geometric objects. Such layout design forms a subject matter of the present invention.
For a conventional system applied to the above-stated purpose, the human designer for creating a layout plan is required to memorize various restriction about interrelationships between such objects in advance.
Recently, a system has been developed by an artificial intelligence study group in the United States of America in which computer parts are automatically arranged in the space inside a computer frame (R.sub.1 : the name of such a system developed by J. Mcdermott at C.M.U. see HAND-BOOK OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE by E. Feigenbaum).
This system possesses a set of rules for determining the places at which computer parts are to be laid out and the layout system uses an appropriate rule depending on the progress of the designing work.
In this system, however, the candidate places of the parts to be laid out must be known in advance.
The best layout (place and direction) for placing an object in a specific space is determined depending on various information such as about objects already existing in the space and their locations and associated objects other than those placed in the space and their locations.
Consequently, a deterministic algorithm or procedure for placing such objects and the like in a space cannot be easily specified in advance.
For a placement problem for arranging objects in a space, the combinational optimization method has been adopted heretofore. When applying this method to a placement problem, the layout designer has usually approached the final solution by optimizing an objective function representing a parameter in this problem, for example, the layout area.
This method, however, is not preferably applied to a problem which handles information other than the element to be obtained through an object function, for example, information that reflects a layout of an object to be placed by conforming to a positional relationship to another object specified as the reference information such things as "the front line placed object should be in line". Consequently, it has been difficult to automatically generate a layout plan similar to one designed based on various information by the expert designer.